Witness: Mayor of Woodstock took cocaine during Zoom meetings

Article content

Editor's Note: This story contains details of alleged physical assault and sexual assault that some readers may find disturbing.

* * *

When Trevor Birtch turned off his camera during the Woodstock City Council's online meeting, the former mayor may not have simply been taking a break from the debate.

“This was during COVID, so it was over Zoom and I had to stay behind the computer,” the plaintiff testified at his second sexual assault trial on Friday.

Article content

“He turned off his station, did coke and then went back and continued his council meeting and I had to keep my mouth shut.”

That wasn't the most alarming description of Birtch's behavior on the third day of testimony at his Superior Court trial, where the former two-term mayor pleaded not guilty to three counts of sexual assault.

The plaintiff, a 39-year-old woman who began her testimony Thursday, continued Friday with further accounts of alcohol, drugs and violent sexual assault, but she also admitted to memory lapses and a long history of addiction and health problems.

This is Birtch's second trial this year. In June, he was convicted of sexual assault and coercion of another woman. A sentencing date is expected to be set next week.

The identities of the victim in the first case and the plaintiff in the current case are protected by court order. However, as the proceedings progressed, there was an overlap between the two cases.

The plaintiff in the current case stated that she and Birtch had been in an on-off relationship since 2017, which ended in 2018 and flared up again a year later, until Birtch raped her on her couch in her Woodstock home in April 2019.

Article content

Article content

It was a relationship based on Birtch's controlling behavior, drugs and alcohol, the woman said. She said she was “embarrassed that I kept going back because I kept letting him back into my life.”

The last sexual assault she could remember occurred after Birtch picked her up outside a beer store. As she sat in the car, he grabbed her breasts, the witness said. Then, during the drive, they drank and took cocaine and possibly some prescription drugs.

Eventually, the couple was back at her house. “I remember lying on the couch. I remember being so drunk I couldn't move, but I could barely speak,” she said.

“I remember him throwing himself at me, but I kept saying things like, 'I'm too high, I'm too high, get off me, stop.'”

“He raped me again and was gone,” she said. “He left the house.”

This was not the first time, she said, that Birtch had attacked her. The couple developed a bizarre pattern in which Birtch would show up at her home often and unannounced. They were often high together, the woman said. Her neighbors, she said, often saw the former mayor walking around her house.

Article content

She remembered him breaking into her house twice. Once he removed a screen from her window. Once she woke up and Birtch was standing over her in bed.

Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Moser questioned the woman about her communications with a previous witness in the trial who was friends with Birtch, but she was alarmed when he sent her a voice message in which he described how he had tied up, raped, beaten and filmed the woman in his attic over several days.

The friend contacted the woman when Birtch was first charged in connection with another woman, and she eventually told her and London police about the disturbing conversation. However, when police asked the woman about the incident in 2022, she said it did not happen.

The woman said she could not remember the incidents and assumed they did not happen because she rarely left her home and pets alone.

But she did remember being at Birtch's house and that the two of them had used the crawl space behind his bed as a “little bedroom” where they did a lot of drugs. She had no memory of the violence Birtch's former boyfriend had described to her, but she had little memory of anything that happened while she was at his house.

Article content

During one of these visits to his home, she saw Birtch snorting cocaine while attending an online council meeting.

The witness said that in the previous trial, before charges were brought, she had contacted the victim and explained to him that she “had also been abused.”

“I told her things just to help her,” she said, but she was rejected.

The witness said she was not jealous because Birtch was seeing other women, but “he was very jealous” and ordered her not to give her phone number to family members and was even jealous of her pets.

She said she had filed a complaint against Birtch with Woodstock police months earlier, but it came to nothing. When she heard that London police had filed charges against the other woman, she realized that London police would take her seriously.

“The London police listened to me,” she said.

Birtch was still mayor and a member of the Woodstock police board when she joined the London police force. She said Birtch was a different person to his public image.

She said she and Birtch discussed the sexual assault in text messages.

“I called him all kinds of names. I cursed at him. I stopped trying to correct his behavior. I just told him he was a lousy person,” she said.

Defense attorney James Battin began his cross-examination, questioning her memory of a trip to Turkey Point, where she said she was beaten by a homeless man and Birtch demanded that she perform a sexual act on her.

Battin said the events she remembered did not happen, there was no sexual assault, and Birtch tried to help her after she was injured.

Battin's cross-examination will continue on Monday.

[email protected]

Article content